Ray Harryhausen

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Ray Harryhausen with a skeleton from Jason and the ArgonautsColumbia / The Kobal Collection

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A scene from Jason And The ArgonautsThe Kobal Collection / Columbia

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A giant crab from Mysterious Island
Columbia / The Kobal Collection

Last updated at 12:01AM, May 8 2013

Innovative and influential film animator who used stop-motion techniques to create an army of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts

Ray Harryhausen was barely five years old when his parents took him to the cinema to see The Lost World, a lavish adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of a professor who visits a Venezuelan plateau to prove his theory that prehistoric creatures still exist. The film features scenes of dinosaurs locked in mortal combat and of huge creatures terrifying the visiting humans. Harryhausen sat spellbound, truly believing that the animals he was watching were real. He knew instinctively, he later said, that he had seen the future direction of his life mapped out that day.